QuoteReplyTopic: Has anybody written a "spam is blocked" in your mailbox notification s Posted: 08 July 2003 at 12:17pm

We are an ISP and use the web interface for our clients. But they must go to the web interface to see if any mail is blocked.

We have the need of a web service that will notify email recipients that they have blocked email in the spam filter. We are thinking of writing a web service in .net to accomplish. Has someone already done it? If so, it is available?

As an ISP also, I do not know if I like the idea or not. It would be easy to implement but would it not be as bad as actually receiving the spam itself? I also think it could have horrible overhead issues if you had to constantly query the DB to see who has spam. Do you have some idea that would not require massive DB accesses?

I would be interested. Response to the web capability among the folks I host has been very favorable. Several people whose email addresses are new (i.e. have not been around long enough to be exposed to spammers) mentioned that they wished the interface would notify them - like IM's "you have mail", but I think they'd be delighted with an email notification.

To make this work without creatig its own annoyance, I recommend that the notification have some configurability (i.e. alert me once per day, alert me once any time I have unchecked spam but not more than once to prevent an alert per spam, etc.)

A separate request that came up here: simple user-level black and white lists for email addresses and a keyword blacklist. If the black/white lists could accept wild cards, it would be easy for individuals to specify whole domains or characteristic addresses with only 2 lists. Keyword filtering would give individuals control over their own content. Simple, but with some level of personal control was the message that I heard here. This would be desirable from my viewpoint because I prefer not to apply keyword filters to my subscribers - too intrusive and problematic, plus my subscribers are international, so peoples' tolerances vary quite widely here. I apply only RBLs and blocks on identified spammer domans and non-major countries (that are primarily used for spam). My subscribers don't want to get involved in that level of blocking. They just want to go after the small stuff that gets thru - and really, it's not much by volume, so we're doing well right now.

I'd not thought about the db impact in my post about nuisance minimization, but I'd think that most people would be happy with a notification period of once per hour. Could let the admin configure it to a longer period to manage load situations.

Also I think that the key here is to tell me once that I have un-checked spam, regardless of how many spam I have in my quarantine that I've not checked. So once you've notified me, I'd be skipped for further notification until I checked my spam - and cleared the unchedked spam "flag". This could be as simple as "clear the flag when I log in to the web interface" - without regard to whether or not I read all of my quarantined spam. Point is that the alert did it's job, and the assumption is that I'll be as thorough or cursory with my spam list as I wish to be - that's a user problem, not a system issue, to sort out.

One further recommendation: allow individuals to opt in to notification from their web interface. Make it opt in rather than opt out. If I want it, I have to sign up for it. If I don't care, I won't - and the system will be spared the overhead without my having to take any action.

I agree with you thoughts -- I should have explained our idea a bit further.

The implementation we are planning would have a trivial impact on resources and would not be a bother to the customer. We are thinking of sending one or two notifications per day to unique "TO" addresses in the quarantine database.

We have our quarantine set to 3 days -- a daily notification would give a customer an oportunity to "know" that blocked mail is held for them. If notification is too often it becomes a problem in itself.

One more question. "A dot net application"? This doesn't seem like the way to go with this one to me. Can you explain? My "gut" reaction would be a either a service written in some flavor of C or visual basic or a "stored procedure" in the DB server itself (my first choice).

I'm in the process of building a complete web based user and admin interface. It's being built in ColdFusion.

One of the first things I did was to add the fields "SendNotice" and "LastLogon" to "tblLogins".

Each weekday morning at 8 am a process runs that queries the logon table, and selects all who have selected to have notices sent. Then the quarantine table is queried by date/time for each user selected.

So, it only runs once a day, only for those that have signed up AND opted to have notices sent.

When it's finished, I'll consider making it available (for a small fee) if anyone is interested.

Our development would be written in ASP.net as a matter of choice. We would write the application and it would be compiled into a Windows web service. We would choose this because we usually develop web applications for ourselves using Visual Studio and develop for the Windows 2000+ platform. If we were to do a stored procedure we would not necessarly have a console to control this proposed notification system. I never intended notification to be a feature request of Logsat. Since the quarantine database is on our MySql server it presents other options too.

We too will probally develop a new client user interface. We are currently using a "pretty" version of the sample code on the Logsat site. We are planning on developing the software for ourselves and I just wanted to know if we were reinventing the wheel.

You must of been reading our minds. I have written a custom app that ties it in our Members Access Area. Notifications of the number of messages quarantined, they can add themselves to the filter bypass list, search within the quarantined items, and custom settings per customerís mailbox, plus options to view certain quarantined items and more. We have written this in Cold Fusion 5 as well and there is not much overhead on any of the servers. We've had this in place since the beta of quarantined feature in the spam filter software and we have about 1.3 million records in our tblquarantine table and about the same number in the tblmsgs table.If anyone is interested in seeing this, please email me at spamfilter@tusco.net?I will provide you with an username and password to view these features.

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